Within the prior art, mobile telephone communication systems are of two general types: cellular telecommunication systems and personal communication systems (PCS) also referred to as telepoint systems. A cellular telecommunication system covers a large geographical area offering a user with a mobile telephone a possibility to make calls at the office, in residential areas, and in vehicles while having continuous service. A disadvantage of cellular telecommunication system is the high cost, weight and size of the telephones, the high charges charged by the operators for becoming a user of such a system, and the high charge per minute of call as compared to a fixed telecommunication system. PCS is a compromise between the low cost and lack of freedom of a fixed telecommunication system and the high cost and freedom of a cellular telecommunication system. The PCS concept offers users small light-weight battery-powered portable telephones for making calls anywhere that has a fixed point telepoint radio transceiver. The telepoint transceivers are located at various places such as railroad stations, airports, pedestrian areas, office buildings, and residential areas. The provision of telepoints in residential areas allows the user of a PCS telephone to make calls from their residence and also provides an alternate telecommunication service to that provided by the fixed telecommunication system. In order to make or receive a call, the user of a PCS telephone must find a telepoint transceiver and must remain within the range of that telepoint transceiver throughout the duration of the call. If the user moves outside the range, the call could be cutoff since there may not be call hand offs between telepoint transceivers. The PCS concept requires comparatively little power consumption in the PCS telephones in comparison to the cellular telephones.
Problems do exist in prior art PCS systems. One problem is that of providing authentication information to a telepoint controller when a user of a PCS telephone wishes to make a call or to register their PCS telephone. Because of the much larger number of PCS telephones and telepoint controllers as compared to cellular telephones and cells in a given geographical area, the use of a central computer to keep track of where PCS telephones are and to provide the authentication information for those telephones is both expensive and extremely time consuming. WIPO Patent Application No. WO 94/01976 discloses such a system where the authentication information is maintained in a management system. U.S. Pat. No. 5,040,177 discloses a telepoint system that utilizes a separate switching network and a service control point network. The service control point network handles the distribution of the authentication information.
Whereas, the prior art systems do provide partial solutions to the problem, these systems do not function well under heavy traffic conditions involving a large number of registrations. What is needed in a distributed switching telecommunication system is a method for distributing the authentication information among the switching nodes that make up the distributed switching telecommunication system.